March 10, 1832
"Some children threw stones at us. Men were sent to arrest the whole village." (112)
* * *
March 12, 1832
"Crossed the Sébou this morning... While crossing the river with us, Bias [a Moroccan customs official] said that they did not build any bridges in order to arrest robbers more easily and to collect taxes and to arrest seditious people. It is he who said that the world is divided into two parts, 'Barbary,' and 'the rest!'" (112f)
* * *
Tangier, April 28, 1832
"At times of distress, the children come out with their school tablets and carry them with solemnity. These tablets are of wood coated with clay. They write with reeds and a sort of sepia which can easily be wiped off. This people is wholly antique." (121)
...
"These peope have a small number of legal cases, anticipated or possible: for certan cases, a given punishment in a given circumstance; but the whole business is arranged without those endless and tiresome details with which our modern authorities overwhelm us. Custom and ancient usage govern everything. The Moor gives thanks to GOd for his poor food and his poor cloak. He considers himself only too happy to have them.
"Certain quite common and antique customs possess a majesty which is lacking among us in even the gravest circumstances. The custom of having the women go on Friday to the graves with the branches that are sold in the market. The weddings with music, the presents borne behind them by the relatives, the couscous, the bags of wheat on mules and asses, an ox, clothes on cushions, etc.
"It must be difficult for them to conceive of the turbulent mind of the Christians and that restlessness of ours which urges us on to novelties. We notice a thousand things which are lacking with these people. Their ignorance produces their calm and their happiness; but we ourselves, are we at the summit of what a more advanced civilization can produce?
"They are closer to nature in a thousand ways: their dress, the form of their shoes. And so beauty has a share in everything they make. As for us, in our corsets, our tight shoes, our ridiculous pinching clothes, we are pitiful. The graces exact vengeance for our science." (121f)
From The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (1948).
Dumas amazes an Arab hunter with his prowess at shooting...
"Tell him," I instructed Bernat, "that in France we like to be further from our target," and my opponent watched in amazement while I paced out twice the distance. "Now," I continued, "explain that my first bullet will hit the target near the red seal, and my second will break the stick." Having announced this program I took aim with the utmost precision I was capable of, for it was my duty to carry out my declared intention. It would not do to come to Africa and mislead the natives, but fortunately I did not default. My first bullet his the seal, and almost simultaneously my second shattered the spar." (21)
* * *
"The Moors do not take kindly to any scientific exploration of their territory, for they can never believe that a government would send an official, equipped with complicated instruments, to draw maps and make incomprehensible calculations, with nothing more sinister in mind than the advancement of knowledge. However, the French are held in such respect, I would even say affection, in this part of Africa [in Carthage] that the reigning Bey gave M. de Sainte-Marie [captain in the Engineers] full authority to make his survey, and even sent a mameluke with an official permit to accompany him for greater security.
"With this mameluke, his own inflexible determination and his amazing courage, M. de Sainte-Marie has carried out almost incredible expeditions, discovering lakes and mountains previously unknown, tribes whose very existence was unsuspected, even by the Bey himself." (131f)
* * *
"As we drove out of Philippeville, a magnificent landscape unfolded before our eyes, bounded on the horizon by mountains of wonderful shapes and colors. TO left and right of the road, the fertile plains were thickly overgrown with tall esparto grass and prolific plants like irises, shooting up from bulbs sometimes as big as a man's head. IN the flowereing season the whole countryside must look like a carpet of blossoms. We met carts driven by countrymen wearing smocks, and passed uniformed roadmenders working on the highway. We could well have imagined ourselves still in France, except that every now and again we caught sight of an Arab shepherd in the shade of a little wood, his eyes sparking fiercely beneath the hood of his tattered burnoose, his traditional crook as proudly borne as a scepter in the hands of an emperor. A hundred yards further on we would see as tent covered with black and white sheepskins like the tents of the Ishmaelites in the Bible, with thorn bushes in a circle around it to keep off jackals and hyenas." (156)
From Alexandre Dumas, Adventures in Algeria, trans. A. Murch (1959; orig. 1848-51).
"As long as you keep Algiers, you will be constantly at war with Africa; sometimes this war will seem to end; but these people will not hate you any the less; it will be a half-extinguished fire that will smoulder under the ash and which, at the first opportunity, will burst into a vast conflagration." -- Baron Lacuée, 1831 (Horne, 23)
"What matter if a hundred thousand rifle shots ring out over Africa! Europe will not hear them." -- King Louis-Philippe, 1835 (Horne, 21)
"It is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams" -- Gustave Flaubert on his Oriental travels.
"From whatever point of view one takes, the consideration of prosperity and of material power, of authority and political influence, or if one contemplates intellectual grandeur, it is an incontrovertible truth: the people that colonizes most is the first of all peoples; if it is not so today, it will be true tomorrow." -- Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, 1874 (De la Colonisation chez les peuples modernes, in Plus grande France, 88)
"Christian people of Alsace and Lorraine, now on the roads of France of Swizerland and Belgium, fleeing your burning homes, your devastated fields: Algeria, African France, by my Bishop's voice, opens its doors and offers you its arm.
"Here you will find for yourselves, your children and your families, abundant lands, more fertile than those that you left behind in the hands of the invader." -- Archbishop of Algiers, former Bishop of Nancy, primate of Lorraine, to the exiled Alsatians and Lorrains, 1871 (Plus grande, 93)
"I felt myself attracted toward Africa by an overwhelming (imperieux) need, by nostalgia for the unknown desert, as by the presentiment of some passion that will be born... I wanted to see this land of sun and sand ..." -- Guy de Maupassant, 1881 (Marseille, 36)
"Algeria is becoming productive under the efforts of those who have recently come here. This new population does not work only for its personal interests but also for the interests of France. There is no doubt that, in the hands of these men, the soil will give up what it never would have given for the Arabs; no doubt the primitive population will disappear bit by bit; and no doubt that this disappearance will be to the benefit of Algeria, but it is terrible (révoltant) that it has taken place in the way that it has." -- Maupassant, Au Soleil, 1884 (Marseille, 79)
"A strange, childlike people, as primitive as it was at the birth of the races. A ferocious, thieving, lying, hypocritical, and savage people, passing their life stealing among each other, deceiving each other, and shooting at each other." -- Maupassant (Marseilles, 87)
"France is nearly the only nation to have come upon the solution to the administration of foreign races: she does not destroy them as others so often have done; she knows better than any to assimilate them to her... She alone, until the present, has dared to conceive of the metropole and the colonies as forming one single country, one single state. French people of France or French people of Africa, of the Antilles, of the Indian ocean, of Indochina, and in the same way, Indians, Senegalese, Oceanic peoples, Kabyles or Arabes brought up in French cities, all, under laws deliberated in common, have the same duties and the same rights." -- Alfred Rambaud, biographer of Jules Ferry, 1886 (Marseille, 141f)
"The land was endless, more than two thirds would remain to clear the land and plant crops, there was a fertility there without end for our humanity without limits." -- Emile Zola, Fécondité, 1899 (Marseille, 80)
"It is necessary, then, to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilization, still recognizing that, while superiority confers rights, it imposes strict obligations in returen. The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality, and it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity. Material power is nothing but a means to that end." -- Jules Harmand, 1910 (Said, Culture and Colonialism, 17)
"The Battle of Sidi-Brahim. During this war, are soldiers were not always triumphant, but they were always brave.... In the towns and villages of France, people recounted the battles of Africa. They were produ of the courage of our soldiers, for one always remembered the wars of the Revolution and the Empire." -- Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France, Cours Moyen, 1912 (Nationalisme francais, 83f)
"This land of Africa is mine and I give it to my children. It does not belong to these poor people, these shepherds, these camel tenders." -- Psichari, Voyage du Centurion, 1916 (Marseille, 51)
"To bring science to those who do not know of it, to give them roads, canals, trains, autos, telegraph lines, telephones, to organize their public health system, to introduce them finally to the rights of man, this is not a requirement of imperialism, it is the task of brotherhood... The country that proclaimed the rights of man, that so brilliantly contributed to the advancement of science, that instituted secular education, the country that, before all the nations, is the great champion of liberty has, in its very history, the mission to spread wherever it can these ideas that have made it great." -- Albert Bayet, member of the Central committe of the rights of man, 1931 (Marseille, 54).
"Colonize? It is to win over to human sweetness the savage hearts of the savanah and the desert." -- Maréchal Lyautey, 1931 (Illustration album for Exposition Coloniale; Marseille, 13)
"The colonial duty has become one form of civic and patriotic duty. To love France is to love the largest France (la plus grande France), that which is not closed in by borders but which shines its light into all parts of the world. These immense overseas domanis need men -- brains, hearts and energy -- to realize their potential... To find the colonists, we must awaken their enthusiasm." -- Lyautey, 1931 (Marseille, 28)
"... in a low voice pierced by an intriguing violence, the master said in arabic, 'If you hear someone tell you that France is your homeland, it is just not true.'" -- Mohammed Dib, 1952 (The Big House)
"There are nine Algerians for each one of us. All that is necessary is to give each colonist nine bullets, and our troubles will be solved." -- Albert Memmi, 1956 (Colonizer) describing a certain colonialist point of view.